heat this time, alarmed that her mother,
in the general reach of a maternal cliché,
should have gathered in the truth so pre-
cisely. She retreated to her room and
thought about Jesus, another deeply
godly person who was not understood as
godly by the sort of clichéd people who
called themselves godly, though, to be
fair, those people were probably also
sometimes godly in their own uneducated
way, but only by accident, and only a bit.
23. FOR THE PROSECUTION
Marcia found Leah's gift during one of
her routine sweeps. These sweeps really
had Cheryl as their object-she had
begun disappearing on Fridays and re-
turning Monday-and nothing would
have been easier for Keisha than to add
dildo possession to her older sister's al-
ready ruined reputation. Unable to look
any longer at Marcia brandishing the
plastic bag, Keisha Blake threw herself
face down on the bed to commence fake
crying but, in the middle of this proce-
dure, found herself locked in a genuine
struggle, unable to countenance blaming
either her sister or Leah, but equally un-
able to imagine the second option-her
father being informed-with which she
was now being presented. Keisha Blake
thought to the left and thought to the
right, but there was no exit, and this was
very likely the first time she became aware
of the problem of suicide.
"And don't tell me you bought it," her
mother said, "because I don't know where
you think you would have got the money."
In the course of this interrogation, Marcia
went through most of the girls on the es-
tate before working herself round to the
painful possibility of Leah and finding the
confirmation in her daughter's face.
24. RUPTURE
There followed a break between Leah
Hanwell and Keisha Blake, enforced by
Marcia, followed by a cooling off that
could not be blamed on Marcia alone.
The girls were sixteen. This period lasted
a year and a halE
25. ANGST!
In the absence of Leah-at school, on
the streets, in Caldwell-Keisha Blake
felt herself to be revealed and exposed.
She had not noticed until the break that
the state of "being Leah Hanwell's
friend" constituted a sort of passport,
lending Keisha a protected form of ac-
cess in most situations. She was now
relegated to the conceptual realm of
"those church kids," most of whom were
Nigerian or otherwise Mrican, and did
not share Keisha Blake's anthropologi-
cal curiosity regarding sin or her love of
rap music. To the children
of her own background, she
believed, rightly or wrongly,
that she was an anomaly,
and to the ravers and the
indie kids she knew for cer-
tain that she was the wrong
kind of outcast. It did not
strike Keisha Blake that
such feelings of alienation
are the banal fate of adolescents every-
where. She considered herself peculiarly
affiicted, and it is not an exaggeration to
say that she struggled to think of any-
one, besides perhaps James Baldwin and
Jesus, who had experienced the pro-
found isolation and loneliness she now
knew to be the one and only true reality
of this world.
26. YOUR ENEMY'S ENEMY
In Keisha Blake's break with Leah Han-
well we must admit that Marcia Blake
spied an opportunity. The break coin-
cided with the problem of sex, which,
anyway, could no longer be ignored. A
simple ban would have backfired-they
had been through all that already with
Cheryl, who was presently twenty years
old and six months pregnant. Pushing
Keisha Blake toward Rodney Banks was
Mrs. Blake's elegant solution: at exactly
the moment that her daughter was about
to detonate, she was defused. Rodney
lived with his parents in a flat on the same
corridor, attended the same school. He
was one of the few Caribbean children in
the church. His mother, Christine, was a
close friend. "You should give Rodney
some time," Marcia said, passing Keisha
Blake a plate to dry. "He's like you, always
reading." For precisely this reason, Keisha
had always been wary of Rodney and keen
to avoid him-as much as that was possi-
ble in a place like Caldwell-on the prin-
ciple that the last thing a drowning person
needs is another drowning person cling-
ing to her.
27. ON THE OTHER HAND
Beggars cannot be choosers.
28. READING WITH RODNEY
Keisha Blake sat on Rodney Banks's bed,
feet tucked underneath her. She was al-
ready five feet eight, while Rodney had
stopped growing the previous summer.
To be Christian to Rodney
Banks, Keisha Blake tried to
sit whenever possible. Rod-
ney had in his hand an
abridged library copy of an
infamous book by Albert
Camus. Both Keisha Blake
and Rodney Banks sounded
the "t" and the "s" in this
name, not knowing any bet-
ter: such are the perils of autodidacticism.
Rodney Banks was reading the text aloud,
with his own skeptical running commen-
tary. He called this "putting faith to the
test." Pastor liked to recommend this
muscular approach to his teen-age flock,
although when he did so it is unlikely that
he had Camus in mind. Rodney Banks
looked somewhat like Martin Luther
King, Jr.: the same rounded, gentle face.
When he made a point that interested
him, he scribbled a little illegal note on
the page, which Keisha read and tried to
admire. She found it hard to concentrate
on the book, because she was concerned
about when and how the heavy petting
would begin. It had happened last Friday
and the Friday before, but she had not
known it was going to happen until the
very last moment, as they were both
somehow unable to refer to it verbally, or
build up to it in a natural manner. In-
stead, she had launched herself at Rodney
both times and hoped for a response,
which she had received, more or less.
'We get into the habit of living before ac-
quiring the habit of thinking," Rodney
read, and then made a note by this sen-
tence: "So what? (Fallacious argument.)"
29. RUMPOLE
The cooling-off period between Kei-
sha Blake and Leah Hanwell contin-
ued through their A-level exams, and
this was partly a pragmatic decision on
Keisha Blake's part. Leah Hanwell was
by this point taking the popular club
amphetamine Ecstasy most weekends,
THE NEW YORKER, JULY 30, 2012 63